The Corporation

Well, a 140 minute documentary, enthralling? The Corporation does what Farenheit 9/11 could probably never do (although I have not seen it). It captivates you with brutal facts and the unambushed words of real people.

The Corporation takes the words of CEOs, real life people and cases to both shock and give hope. There are plenty of voices including Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Milton Friedman and of course Michael Moore. In fact, it is mostly composed of voices of others rather than the manipulating voice of a narrator (a la Moore),

One of the interesting sticking points of the whole movie was that in America, through the unlikeliest of processes, an incorporated company has the same rights as an human individual. This is true in New Zealand too apparently. Therefore it is legal to hold property, sue, be sued etc. But, as the film would like to point out, if it is an individual, does it have morality? What is its personality? If we consider the actions of some corporations, they would fulfill all the requirements to be considered psychopaths as per the DSM-IV psychiatric assessment. Do we as a society have control of these undesireables? Yes we do, if we want to (the whole punchline of the film).

At some points, it made you cringe (Monsanto's sins take a lot to swallow). It is often ironically humorous (Michael Moore was comic relief but the words from actual people's mouths is perhaps the most startlingly humorous). Its production is excellent. At the end, you are certainly in a state of information overload, but you can't help but be affected.

The director Mark Achbar was there at the start and end willing to do Q&A and explain deeply some of the details of the "making of" and his thoughts on the current system. Interesting questions did come up although he had to give it to other people sometimes, "How much would our tickets cost without the sponsorship of Telecom?"

As a documentary, it MUST rate as an exceptional one. It was affective, and served for me as an antithesis to my musing on political liberalism. It didn't answer everything though. For example, it raised the example of Cochabamba (a city in Bolivia) of why water privatisation was flawed proposition. BUT, it didn't say how the necessity for water privatisation was controlled. Of course, I can research that.

The last phase of the movie was one thing that set it apart in that it made many suggestions for the forms change could take. I am glad I watched it.